Telling Right from Left

Almost all of my friends have at least one trick to compensate for that maddening skill that somehow got skipped on their inventory before birth.

I know several highly competent—gifted, even—adults who need to stop and figure out “left” and “right” by surreptitiously forming the letter “L” with their thumbs and forefingers, noting that the hand that forms the correct orientation of the “L” is their left.

Me? Apparently I got a broken hippocampus: I was born without an inner GPS. I have the sense of direction of a mandarin orange: there is none. Stop me in the middle of a sentence and ask me to immediately point to where “home” is, and I will be, 100% of the time, wrong.

For Rick, the challenge lies in keeping “horizontal” and “vertical” straight. Fortunately for Rick and his fellow sufferers, the trick in this case is embedded right in the word itself: the “horizon” is “horizontal.”

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